EOTO Reaction: Celebrity Journalism

 As a very avid fan of celebrity journalism, this was a fun topic to get to learn about, especially as it's one of the most popular forms of journalism in the world! Basically, Celebrity Journalism is how we keep up to date with all our favorite Hollywood stars, musicians, and newly minted socialites. 

The beginning of celebrity journalism, had a lot to do with who has considered a celebrity at the time. In the early stages it consisted of people like politicians, making the first celebrity interview / presidential interview President Adams. He was interviewed by Anne Newport Royall, the very first American newswoman. This gained very much popularity, resulting in the birth of a new form of journalism!

Celebrity journalism is often associated with Yellow Journalism, both excessively use catchy headlines to draw in readers often based on gossip and rumor. Publications found this very profitable, as getting an inside look on private life of famous people caught the attention of readers. 

Soon enough, gossip magazines began to pop up in the United States, the first being Photoplay. It was founded in Chicago, the same year another fan-aimed magazine was created, the Motion Picture Story. Some of the celebrities that were featured at the time included: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Arlene Dahl, and Elizabeth Taylor. 

The main draw to celebrity journalism had less to do with the entertainment of all the drama, but more with the fixation and distraction it provided for everyday citizens. This hasn't really changed, if anything celebrity journalism has expanded into a way for celebrities to profit off of this such as reality tv shows and social media influencing. It draws away attention from daily life, political issues, and provides a break from daily life. It fascinates readers to learn about celebrity divorces, new relationships, pregnancy scandals, and so much more. 

I think the best example of those who capitalized off of this are people like the Kardashians, as they became famous for simply wanting this attention. They gave into the tabloids, ran around life with cameras following them, and made a massive amount of money out of it. 

Me personally, I love giving into celebrity gossip. I find it thrilling to know what's happening with Harry Styles and his newly rumored girlfriend, or the millions of speculations of what Taylor Swift is going to release next, and growing up in a city where I get to see both sides of the situation gives me a new perspective. I think it's a very lucrative industry, do I agree with the tactics of lies and invading privacy most celebrity journalists or paparazzi photographers use, no. But, I do think celebrities enjoy it to some degree too, when it works in their favor. After all, there is no such thing as bad publicity. 

The Girl Reporters.

 The Girl Reporters, originally called the Stunt Reporters, were pioneers in the investigative journalism world. The job was most popular during the 1880s and 90s, enlisting girls to go undercover into dangerous situations in efforts of exposing institutional ills. Some of these ills will include stifling factories, child labor, unscrupulous doctors, scams and cheats. Their stories became popular right after the printing press took off, because it was cheaper and quicker to get papers out to the public, making their primary demographic recent immigrants and factory workers, basically low income residents of bigger cities. 

Their writing style was innovative, providing a new way to showcase womanhood through traits like bravery, independence, professionalism, ambition, charm, and yet unapologetically female. During this time, women and wives still weren't considered full citizens under the "coverture" law, they weren't able to vote which resulted in no laws to protect them from sexual harassment or marital rape. One of the most famous and influential naysayers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote about his fear of female writers his age, saying that there's an "impropriety in the display of the woman's naked mind to the gaze of the world."

To fight off, these vicious and damaging stereotypes, women began writing under male pen names like George Eliot and Brontë and they wrote their essays and stories with an obscure sex to the narrator an example being Mary Kate in Land of Little Rain. 

Stunt reporting challenged the idea Hawthorne put out into the world, when they couldn't cast ballots, they took the time to interview presidential candidates, when they couldn't sit in on juries, they reported on trials offering their perspectives. They were unlike the average female reporters, who masked their gender, these women embraced all of it and wrote about their experiences of harassment, judgement, abortion seeking, and even little things like having crushes or a bad hair day. This was all deemed frivolous, emotional, and in all terms of the word "female", but they completely altered the journalistic landscape. 

Some of the revolutionary Girl Reporters were Nellie Bly, Eva Gay, Nora Marks, Annie Laurie, Gertrude Gordon, Elizabeth Jordan, and Ida B. Wells. But the one that prompted the use of the term "Girl Reporters" is still a mystery. It first popped up in as the byline for a Chicago Times, abortion exposé story in 1888 called "Infanticide", and just caught on from there. 

But the journalism method of deep undercover identities, was only made popular after Nellie Bly's 1887 story for the New York World, "Ten Days in the Mad House." Bly got herself committed into the infamous Blackwell's Island insane asylum of NYC for ten days, and later wrote about her experiences and observations from that time. Similarly, Annie Laurie faked a fainting in the streets of San Francisco in order to get a story for The Examiner, where she exposed the ill treatment in public hospitals. 

The work these women did created real world change, with increased funding to mental health facilities, and inspiring labor organizations to push for better labor protection laws. One of these women was Eva Gay, or rather Eva McDonald. She was a young reporter for the St. Paul Daily Globe following leads in Minneapolis regarding women's labor rights. Through her continued activism on and off the page, she became a central figure in Minnesota's Labor Rights Movement. She also was one of the Girl Reporters that used a pseudonym, Eva Gay, first premiered in her weekly column "Mong Girls Who Toil."

The use of female pen names were to protect the identities of these women, and a male editor for The Journalist in 1889 said it perfectly. "Many of the brightest women frequently disguise their identity, not under one nom de plume, but under half a dozen... This renders anything like a solid reputation almost impossible." All in all, these women were little known, little respected, and almost never came out from undercover.